Taboo desires are impishly kindled in Stoker, the English-language debut of Korean director Park Chan-wook. Park’sfilmis head-spinningly kinky stuff, even by Korean standards, and the fact it has somehow emerged from the American studio system in all its unhinged glory is itself a marvel. You could pitch the film as 'Alfred Hitchcock psychological thriller meets Tim Burton coming-of-age freak-out’, but in fact the whole thing thrums with a blackly comic eroticism that is Park’s own. The script is by Wentworth Miller, whose day job is lead hunk on the television series Prison Break, and while it is no teen vampire romp, the title’s gothic resonance is strictly intentional.

Mia Wasikowska stars as India Stoker, a sallow, hug-phobic young woman who lives in a draughty Deep South mansion with her mother Evelyn (Nicole Kidman). The Stoker paterfamilias has recently expired in a road accident, and at his funeral India meets her debonair, well-travelled Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), whose name alone should set Shadow of a Doubt fans’ antennae twitching. Charlie moves into the Stoker residence and bewitches both mother and daughter. Then people start to disappear, and the strange truth about Charlie’s past seeps out.

Wasikowska, a revelation in the recent BBC Films adaptation of Jane Eyre, entrances from the off. Nascent womanhood flickers across her face like a candle flame, although it later intensifies to an eye-crinkling glow, and she, Kidman and Goode have a tingly three-way chemistry intensified by Park’s dreamily seductive style.

There is nothing quite so tough in Stoker as the moment in Park’s Oldboy (2003) when the hero guzzles a live octopus, but the whole film heaves with the same carnivorous bravado. It feels like a cult classic waiting to happen. I hope it does. I think it will. It should.